SCCN, AJC embiggen undersea pipes

With multiple trans-Pacific cable proposals in the offing, Southern Cross Cable Network has deployed its tried-and-tested response to looming competition and announced a major capacity upgrade.

Just six months after it announced that all routes had been upgraded with 100 Gbps equipment, the submarine operator has announced that it'll be rolling out new Ciena kit to add another half-Terabit capacity to each link.

By July this year, the Ciena WaveLogic 3 deployment will add 500 Gbps to SCCN's two trans-Pacific cables, taking the total lit capacity on its network to 3.6 Tbps.

SCCN isn't the only ex-Australia cable operator to plan embiggening its pipes this year: Australia-Japan Cable (AJC) has also announced a capacity upgrade using Infinera systems. The company has announced that it has implemented Infinera's DTN-X packet optical system on its cables.

The rollout gives AJC 500 Gbps per line card, and will let it deliver customer Ethernet services at 10, 40 and 100 Gbps.

Infinera elbowed Ciena aside to win the AJC upgrade: in 2012, Ciena's 6500 packet-optical system was deployed to add 560 Gbps of capacity to the network.

Both operators have an eye to potential new competition. Currently, Telstra is the only other carrier with a trans-Pacific cable from Australia to the US (Endeavour, which only carries Telstra traffic), but several proposals for competitive cables have been put forward in New Zealand. The northern route out of Australia is contested by TPG-owned PIPE Networks; Nextgen is proceeding with its planned Australia-Singapore cable, and the planned Trident Subsea Cable will link Perth and the Pilbara to Jakarta and Singapore in 2015. ®